


Eight Little Spiders

by Game_of_Thorns



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Don't copy to other sites, Gen, Natasha has feelings, let my spider keep her sisters pls, this is a Natasha has a personality household
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-18 16:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18253166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Game_of_Thorns/pseuds/Game_of_Thorns
Summary: Once, there were forty of them, cold, scared and huddled together. Now, there's only eight.





	Eight Little Spiders

Natasha remembered them, each and every one. In the beginning, there were forty. Forty little girls in ballet slippers. Forty little girls made to line up outside and stand in the snow for hours. There were days when she could list off all their names and numbers, and days when she couldn’t remember most of their faces. They had been her classmates, and then, when their numbers dwindled from forty, to thirty-two, then twenty-eight, they were her sisters.

They had all shared a draughty dorm room, their twenty-eight uncomfortable beds lined up against the cold metal walls. They had gone through it all together, breaking and being broken, impossible missions and freezing nights where water crept in through the holes in their room, freezing into icicles on the window sill and sparkling sheets over the walls. They reminded each other of names and faces of the sisters they had lost, teaching in the dark when one of them returned and couldn’t remember.

There were twenty-eight, then twelve, and then only eight. Eight little spiders who held onto each other so tightly, clinging to each other as the Red Room began to fall apart, and when it lay in pieces around them, they ran. The eight of them ran, fleeing in the night, raiding old safe houses and abandoned bases as they went, running until they found themselves in Budapest. Eight little spiders who clung to each other every night in an abandoned safe house from a mission long ago, and for a while, they got by with only each other for company.

They survived on what they could take without notice, on what they scavenged from abandoned buildings and destroyed shopfronts in the abandoned quarter of the city. The eight of them had very little, but they made do — after all, there had been times where they had almost nothing, and they had survived. Natasha took to hunting for supplies with ease, scouting out hidden stashes and locating the best sources. She lived for it, and she and her sisters were more comfortable than they had ever been. Or at least, they were comfortable for a while.

The abandoned quarter of Budapest was slowly reawakening, filling with unsavoury types as it became the bad part of town. They fought for their space and their supplies, and whilst they were good at hiding, their presence did not go unnoticed. The eight of them kept their heads down, trying to keep hidden, but it wasn’t long before S.H.I.E.L.D. came knocking, and without their old network of intel, they were unprepared.

—————

Natasha squatted on the edge of the roof of a warehouse, peering down into the yard below as a rickety truck was being unloaded. The view wasn’t great, and there was little cover to hide behind, but she could tell that the shipment she was looking at was what they needed. She had watched them unload the first few crates, heavy, large, and solid, almost certainly weaponry, and not likely to be what they needed. Next, the men were hauling out pallets stacked with cans and bags — food. If they took out this lot, a group of illegal weapons dealers, she knew they would have supplies for months, but before she got too hopeful, she knew she had to go back to her sisters to plan their attack. Turning her attention back to the men and the truck in the yard below, she watched silently as the truck started up with an unhealthy cough and splutter and was backed into a parking space around the back of the warehouse. The men, she noted, weren’t huge and bulky like some of the groups they had taken out before. From her viewing point, they appeared to be wiry and quick in their movements, and from how much she’d had to work to track down the warehouse, whoever ran the joint valued intelligence. 

The men all filed inside the warehouse, the doors shutting behind them, and Natasha knew she had only a few moments to run before the security system she had temporarily disabled came back online, so she fled. It was only after she was sliding down the drainpipe of the building beside where she and her sisters were hiding out that she sensed the presence of someone else. She could feel eyes on her, watching her from several buildings away, and she felt a surge of panic rising in her chest. She had just led someone to their hideout, to her sisters. Someone knew about them, someone had tracked them down. There were very few options for escape. None that would get her and her sisters out safely. She was cornered in an alley by a shadow watching her from the rooftops and there was nowhere to go. She ducked behind a dumpster as something whizzed passed her leg, embedding itself in the wall of the building behind her. An arrow, of all things.

Natasha could sense her watcher closer to her now, picking up both the faint sounds of someone settling onto a roof above her and the sounds of vehicles pulling up nearby. There was no way she could get out of this alive except to fight her way out. A car door slammed nearby, and there was a sharp burst of Russian, a clink of something hooking into a ledge above her and a soft whoosh as someone joined her in the alleyway, boots landing with a thud on the cracked cobble stones.

“Natalia—“ she hadn’t been called Natalia in a long time. “—come out. There’s no escape here.” She didn’t respond, and the voice, a man’s voice, sighed and spoke again. “I’m under orders to stop you. You’ve been cornered.” In the distance there was another shout of Russian and a burst of gunfire. The man swore. “Look, come out or we’re going to have company in a few seconds, and I don’t think they’re friendly.” From her hiding spot, she frowned, cautiously ducking out into the open, only to seize the man’s wrist and drag him back to her hiding spot, kicking aside a cardboard box and pushing on a section of wall. The wall swung inwards and she shoved him down first, slithering in afterwards, pulling the box back and pushing the door shut.

He cursed as she shoved him down the narrow tunnel, through another door, down a set of stairs and into a room, sending him tripping and tumbling to the floor. Natasha stood above him as he groaned, closing his eyes for a second, not noticing or hearing the seven other shadows that slipped into the room and surrounded him. When he opened his eyes again, there she was — Natalia, the famous Black Widow, standing above him, hands on her hips and her face framed by red curls — and then he saw the other seven.

“Bring home a stray, sister?” one of the girls asked, eyeing him cautiously.  
“It was bring him down here or leave him for the Red Room to grab,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, he said he’s under orders to stop me, and he interrupted me on my way to back from the warehouse, which, by the way, has enough supplies for months.” Natasha grinned as her sisters perked up.  
“Correction,” the archer interrupted from the floor, “I interrupted to stop you from wrecking a place we’ve been watching for months. You’ve wrecked enough of our ops as it is.”  
“They have supplies, we take them,” a short blonde said with a shrug.  
“You also ruin any chance we have of shutting down their network,” the archer grumbled, “My boss is already breathing down my neck about the number of failed missions here.”  
“So you here to kill us or what?” a tall brunette asked. The archer looked uncomfortable, sweating a little.  
“That plan’s getting more unlikely by the minute, but I can offer something else…” he says. Eight faces looked at him with interest and several moments later, they’ve slipped into the shadows, darting between hiding spots all the way to the extraction point.

—————

On board the quinjet, the eight sisters were huddled together. The tall brunette, Aleks, gripped Natasha’s hand like a lifeline, nervous as the engines rumbled beneath them. Katya’s hand brushed her shoulder, Tania’s body pressed into her side. The archer had sat in a corner, his voice low and sharp as he argued with someone on the other end of his communications device. Natasha found herself remembering huddling with forty other little girls, shivering in the cold outside the Red Room’s ballet studio, and she tugged Aleks closer. The rest of them squished in around her, as if that would stop the cold metal of the quinjet from seeping into their bones, and for the first time since their escape, she let herself be afraid.

Afraid. She hadn’t been afraid in a long time, and yet, as they shuffled off the quinjet, all moving as one, she knew she wasn’t the only one afraid. Somewhere behind her, Anya clung to Yelena, and Yelena held on tightly to Olga, who grabbed hold of Petra. The guards stood ready, weapons in hand as the figure of Director Fury strode towards them, Assistant Director Hill by his side. The eight little spiders weren’t little girls anymore, scared and trembling inside the halls of the Red Room, but they still clung to each other as he eyed them over, nodded, and walked away. That, Natasha later realised, was an approval for a second chance, an approval for eight ex-Red Room assassins to prove themselves, and that the Director, for all his strangeness, had offered them a home.


End file.
